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  Corsair

  First published in 1987

  Copyright: Kay Pope; House of Stratus 1987-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Dudley Pope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., 21 Beeching Park, Kelly Bray,

  Cornwall, PL17 8QS, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755104404 9780755104406 Print

  0755117832 9780755117833 Pdf

  0755119290 9780755119295 Mobi

  0755120426 9780755120420 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Dudley Bernard Egerton Pope was born in Ashford, Kent on 29 December 1925. When at the tender age of fourteen World War II broke out and Dudley attempted to join the Home Guard by concealing his age. At sixteen, once again using a ruse, he joined the merchant navy a year early, signing papers as a cadet with the Silver Line. They sailed between Liverpool and West Africa, carrying groundnut oil.

  Before long, his ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic and a few survivors, including Dudley, spent two weeks in a lifeboat prior to being rescued. His injuries were severe and because of them he was invalided out of the merchant service and refused entry into the Royal Navy when officially called up for active service aged eighteen.

  Turning to journalism, he set about ‘getting on with the rest of his life’, as the Naval Review Board had advised him. He graduated to being Naval and Defence correspondent with the London Evening News in 1944. The call of the sea, however, was never far away and by the late 1940’s he had managed to acquire his first boat. In it, he took part in cross-channel races and also sailed off to Denmark, where he created something of a stir, his being one of the first yachts to visit the country since the war.

  In 1953 he met Kay, whom he married in 1954, and together they formed a lifelong partnership in pursuit of scholarly adventure on the sea. From 1959 they were based in Porto Santo Stefano in Italy for a few years, wintering on land and living aboard during the summer. They traded up boats wherever possible, so as to provide more living space, and Kay Pope states:

  ‘In September 1963, we returned to England where we had bought the 53 foot cutter Golden Dragon and moved on board where she lay on the east coast. In July 1965, we cruised down the coasts of Spain and Portugal, to Gibraltar, and then to the Canary Islands. Early November of the same year we then sailed across the Atlantic to Barbados and Grenada, where we stayed three years.

  Our daughter, Victoria was 4 months old when we left the UK and 10 months when we arrived in Barbados. In April 1968, we moved on board ‘Ramage’ in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands and lost our mainmast off St Croix, when attempting to return to Grenada.’

  The couple spent the next nine years cruising between the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, before going to Antigua in 1977 and finally St.Martin in 1979.

  The sea was clearly in Pope’s blood, his family having originated in Padstow, Cornwall and later owning a shipyard in Plymouth. His great-grandfather had actually preceded him to the West Indies when in 1823, after a spell in Canada, he went to St.Vincent as a Methodist missionary, before returning to the family business in Devon.

  In later life, Dudley Pope was forced to move ashore because of vertigo and other difficulties caused by injuries sustained during the war. He died in St.Martin in 1997, where Kay now lives. Their daughter, Victoria, has in turn inherited a love of the sea and lives on a sloop, as well as practising her father's initial profession of journalism.

  As an experienced seaman, talented journalist and historian, it was a natural progression for Pope to write authoritative accounts of naval battles and his first book, Flag 4: The Battle of Coastal Forces in the Mediterranean, was published in 1954. This was followed in 1956 by the Battle of the River Plate, which remains the most accurate and meticulously researched account of this first turning point for Britain in World War II. Many more followed, including the biography of Sir Henry Morgan, (Harry Morgan’s Way) which has one won wide acclaim as being both scholarly and thoroughly readable. It portrays the history of Britain’s early Caribbean settlement and describes the Buccaneer’s bases and refuges, the way they lived, their ships and the raids they made on the coast of central America and the Spain Main, including the sack of Panama.

  Recognising Pope’s talent and eye for detail, C.S. Forrester (the creator of the Hornblower Series) encouraged him to try his hand at fiction. The result, in 1965, was the appearance of the first of the Ramage novels, followed by a further seventeen culminating with Ramage and the Dido which was published in 1989. These follow the career and exploits of a young naval officer, Nicholas Ramage, who was clearly named after Pope’s yacht. He also published the ‘Ned Yorke’ series of novels, which commences as would be expected in the Caribbean, in the seventeenth century, but culminates in ‘Convoy’ and ‘Decoy’ with a Ned Yorke of the same family many generations on fighting the Battle of the Atlantic.

  All of Dudley Pope’s works are renowned for their level of detail and accuracy, as well as managing to bring to the modern reader an authentic feeling of the atmosphere of the times in which they are set.

  ‘Expert knowledge of naval history’- Guardian

  “An author who really knows Nelson’s navy” - Observer

  ‘The best of Hornblower’s successors’ - Sunday Times

  ‘All the verve and expertise of Forrester’ - Observer

  Dedication

  For Frank and Ann McEwan

  Hispaniola & the Spanish Main

  Chapter One

  “The brothels have to close: all of them. I don’t care what happens to the women,” the governor added hurriedly, as though trying to ward off arguments. “And the taverns. One to each street is quite enough: the rest must be shut down.”

  A round-faced and plump man with a normally jolly manner, whom Ned recognized as O’Leary, the ship chandler in Port Royal, said: “This is only the second meeting of Jamaica’s legislative assembly. I’d have thought we’d be deciding about more important things than whorehouses and rumbullion shops.”

  “But these are important things,” the governor objected crossly. He was a small man with a whining voice. His pointed face, urine-coloured beard with tobacco-stained moustache, tiny dark eyes and yellowed teeth made him look like a harassed ferret, and the skin of his face was pale, freckled like peppercorns sprinkled on cold pork rind.

  He tapped the table with a claw-like hand. “Why, my wife can’t walk along somewhere like Cannon Street without seeing these – these women – flaunting themselves at the windows of the establishments.”

  “Then she shouldn’t be walking along Cannon Street,” snapped Kinnock, Port Royal’s pawnbroker. Kinnock had a narrow and mean-looking face from which protruded a sharp and heavily veined red nose, and long moustaches once blond but now greying and sagging from perspiration. Kinnock w
as a heavy drinker and perspired as a result, as though heated by a personal furnace. “This is a seaport,” Kinnock added peevishly. “Seamen look for taverns and brothels. Where else are they going to spend their money?”

  “I’m certainly not pandering to all this lechery,” the governor said. Sir Harold Neil Luce was almost out of his depth: a recent Roundhead and only just able to change to being a Royalist in time as the King was restored to the throne, Luce had been lucky enough to badger the Privy Council into giving him the governorship of Jamaica without the Council knowing too much about the man or the island, or caring that he would have to be given a knighthood to go with the job.

  “Steady on, Your Excellency,” O’Leary persisted. “Jamaica depends on trade. That means ships, and ships mean seamen. No seamen means no ships and no trade.”

  “Shutting the brothels won’t drive away ships,” Luce said stubbornly. “Ships go where their owners say, not where seamen please. If there’s a cargo in London for Port Royal, then that’s where the ship goes.”

  O’Leary sighed and looked round at the other eleven councillors, as though trying to draw patience from them. “Your Excellency forgets the shipowners already have to pay more to get seamen to come here: the sickness and the Spaniards mean a seaman is reluctant to sign on in London, or Bristol, or Liverpool. But it isn’t only the ships with cargoes that matter here: you’ll drive away the rest of ’em, and that’s what we have to worry about.”

  The governor looked puzzled, his lips drawn back to reveal his yellow teeth. “What do you mean, ‘the rest of them’? I don’t understand you, Mr O’Leary.”

  The chandler looked across the table at Ned and then sighed without trying to hide his exasperation. “Your Excellency, remember this: the Spaniards surround us – the Main, Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico. Very unwisely our King, while he was in exile in Spain and before he was restored to the English throne, promised to return Jamaica to the Dons. That you know.

  “Fortunately, he hasn’t taken any steps to do this yet, but the Spanish are prodding him: you know as well as I that the Prince de Ligne is in London for that very purpose.

  “Quite apart from that, the Spaniards claim the whole of the Caribbee for themselves: every foreigner is a trespasser who risks the garrotte round his neck for being a heretic. Yet, one of the first things you did when you arrived here was to disband the Army and pay off the soldiers. So any minute the Dons might try to recapture Jamaica – and how many of the King’s ships do you have to drive them off?”

  “Ah, answer that!” Kinnock said sharply, knocking on the table with a thick gold ring he wore on the middle finger of his right hand. It was heavy enough to sound like a gavel.

  “You know perfectly well I don’t have any ships,” a startled Sir Harold admitted. “Anyway, the Spanish haven’t made a move yet.”

  “That’s not to say they won’t,” O’Leary persisted. “Once they hear about you disbanding the Army and driving away our defence, they’ll be here, never fear! You can’t keep a dog away from a bone.”

  “What do you mean, ‘driving away our defence’?” Luce demanded.

  “I mean,” O’Leary said deliberately, raising his voice and looking round for the approval of the other councillors, “that we have to look after the buccaneers. Drive them away and we are defenceless. The Dons could capture the island with one ship carrying a hundred men, a priest and a donkey.”

  “I fail to see what all this has to do with closing the brothels,” Luce said pompously. “Really!”

  O’Leary, his face growing red, pressed his hands flat down on the table, as though to prevent it rising in the air. “Your Excellency,” he said, his voice tight with suppressed anger, “there are more than a thousand buccaneers and thirty or so of their ships using Port Royal as a base. They can get cordage, sailcloth and that sort of thing from my chandlery. They get fresh meat from the market and salt meat and boucan from shops. That means the ships can be kept in good order. It also means,” he said emphatically, “that we have thirty ships and more than a thousand trained men to defend us against the Dons. Providing they stay here.”

  He pointed at Luce and asked: “What do a thousand men do when they are not working on board their ships? Go to church and pray? Pick bananas? Throw mangoes at the wild dogs? Perhaps it’s escaped Your Excellency’s attention that we don’t have a proper church, even if the buccaneers were given to praying, which they aren’t. No, wenching and boozing is what they want to do o’ an evening, and now Cromwell and his Puritans are dead and gone, who is to forbid them? Surely not the governor of Jamaica, who depends on them for his defence.”

  “No,” Luce said stubbornly, his tiny eyes blinking like a dazzled ferret emerging from a rabbit warren into bright sunlight, “my mind is made up. Port Royal is not going to continue to be a city of sin and debauchery. It’s an indication of what I mean that there are more than twenty brothels and, as you’ve just pointed out, no proper church.”

  “Twenty, eh?” O’Leary said sourly. “Well I’m damned, I never heard of anyone going round counting them. That’s the advantage of being governor.”

  Ned coughed and the governor and councillors looked at him.

  “I was just going to say that the brothel owners and tavern keepers have all built their own establishments and have to pay out money to run them. If Port Royal is to have a church, perhaps the governor could give instructions…”

  “Where’s the money to come from?” Luce demanded.

  Ned coughed again and said nothing, but Sir Thomas Whetstone, sitting beside him, burst out wrathfully: “The Brethren of the Coast have supplied the present government with guns, gold, silver and gems worth scores of thousands of pounds. Pieces of eight have fallen like rain. Where has all that money gone?”

  “Into the Treasury,” Luce said sharply. “There are dozens of expenses the government must meet. Sometimes I think you don’t understand.”

  “Your Excellency,” Sir Thomas said, making no attempt to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, “long before you arrived out here Mr Yorke and I, along with the Brethren, were raiding Spanish possessions – like Portobelo, for example – to bring riches to this island. Why, the island’s currency is founded on the very pieces of eight brought in by the Brethren. Its forts bristle with guns the Brethren brought over after the raids on Santiago and Portobelo. And the Treasury only recently received even more bullion from the Spanish galleon Mr Yorke and I captured at St Martin. Are you sure the Treasury can’t afford a church?”

  “We’re not discussing the church,” Sir Harold said evasively. “We’re discussing the closing of the brothels.”

  “Ah yes,” Whetstone said, “the sacred and the profane. Well, the choice is yours. Brothels, buccaneers and the island defended; or no brothels, no buccaneers, and no defence.”

  “I don’t think the safety of Jamaica should depend on a lot of pirates hanging about brothels and taverns,” the governor said stiffly.

  “Pirates!” O’Leary said wrathfully. “I thought by now you could tell the difference. I find it alarming that the governor of this island in the second meeting of the legislative council can talk of ‘pirates’. If you mean Mr Yorke’s buccaneers – the Brethren of the Coast – then please refer to them as buccaneers. But if you really mean pirates, then remember that if you want them hunted down you have to ask the buccaneers to do it: you don’t have a single ship of your own.”

  Ned looked up at the ceiling of the small room and said quietly: “If you don’t intend to rely on the buccaneers lounging in brothels and taverns to defend the island against the Spanish, who had Your Excellency in mind?”

  “The whole idea is absurd,” Luce said. “The Spanish will never attack Jamaica.”

  “Why not?” Sir Thomas asked. “After all, they do own Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and all the Main. Apart from a few little islands up to the e
astward that they can’t be bothered with, they own everything else. Don’t forget, they value Jamaica enough to get our King to agree to give it back!”

  Luce looked patronizingly at Sir Thomas. “You can take my word for it: the Spanish will not come.”

  “Oh, most reassuring, most reassuring,” Sir Thomas said. “You have been out here, Your Excellency, for fewer months than I have years, but I must admit that I’d never dare give such an assurance – and with so much authority, too. Most grateful,” he said caustically.

  “The Spanish won’t come and we don’t need brothels,” Sir Harold repeated emphatically, banging the table as if to drive home the point.

  “But supposing the Spanish do come?” persisted Kinnock.

  Sir Thomas Whetstone gave a bitter laugh. “The first thing they’d do is plan a church. And while the plans were being drawn they’d reopen the brothels. After all, they are men and fighting men need brothels and taverns.”

  “Why do they?” the governor demanded angrily. “Lewdness and lechery, venery and vileness.” He lingered over each word as if savouring it. “They don’t have them on the Main.”

  “Oh, don’t they?” asked a startled Sir Thomas. “How do you know, Your Excellency, you who’ve never been to the Main? All I can say is that every Spanish town and city I’ve ever visited had its share of what looked remarkably like brothels to me. Shall I describe them?”

  “There’s no need,” Luce said hurriedly. He looked around the table defiantly and said: “I shall be signing the decree closing the brothels at the end of this meeting.”

  Ned Yorke looked up and said: “Your Excellency, as Admiral of the Brethren of the Coast, I should warn you that what you have heard – that the Brethren base themselves here in Port Royal because it has all what I might call the amenities – is perfectly true. If you start removing those amenities they’ll go elsewhere.”